Rogoff learned chess from his father at age six, but took up the game in earnest when he got a chess set for his 13th birthday. He was soon recognised as a chess prodigy. By age 14, he was a USCF master and New York State Open Champion, and shortly thereafter became a senior master, the highest US national title.[citation needed]

At sixteen Rogoff dropped out of high school to concentrate on chess, and spent the next several years living primarily in Europe and playing in tournaments there. However, at eighteen he made the decision to go to college and pursue a career in economics rather than to become a professional player, although he continued to play and improve for several years afterward. Rogoff was awarded the IM title in 1974, and the GM title in 1978. He was 3rd in the World Junior Championship of 1971 and finished 2nd in the US Championship of 1975, which doubled as a Zonal competition, a half point behind Walter Browne; this result qualified him for the 1976 Interzonal at Biel where he finished 13–15th. In other tournaments, he drew for first at Norristown in 1973 and at Orense in 1976.[1] He has also drawn individual games against former world champions Mikhail Tal[2] and Tigran Petrosian.[3] In 2012 he drew a blitz game with the world's highest rated player Magnus Carlsen.[4]

In 2002, Rogoff was in the spotlight because of a dispute with Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and 2001 Nobel Prize winner. After Stiglitz criticized the IMF in his book, Globalization and Its Discontents, Rogoff replied in an open letter.[6]

In April 2013, Rogoff was at the centre of worldwide attention with Carmen Reinhart (coauthor of the book This Time is Different) when their widely cited study "Growth in a Time of Debt" was shown to contain computation errors which critics claim undermine its central thesis that too much debt causes recession.[7][8] An analysis by Herndon, Ash and Pollin argued that "coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in the post-war period."[9] Their calculations demonstrated that high debt countries grew at 2.2 percent, rather than the −0.1 percent figure initially cited by Reinhart and Rogoff.[9] Rogoff and Reinhardt claimed that their fundamental conclusions were accurate after correcting the coding errors detected by their critics.[10][11] They further disavowed the claim frequently attributed to them that a 90% government debt to GDP ratio is a specific tipping point for growth outcomes.[12] Further papers by Rogoff and Reinhart,[13] and the International Monetary Fund,[14] which were not found to contain similar errors, reached conclusions similar to the initial paper. The subject remains controversial, because of the political ramifications of the research, though in Rogoff and Reinhart's words "[t]he politically charged discussion ... has falsely equated our finding of a negative association between debt and growth with an unambiguous call for austerity."[12] He is a member in the Group of Thirty.